Affluence Quotes

“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Neatness and cleanliness is not a function of how rich or poor you are but that of mentality and principle.”
― Ikechukwu Izuakor, Great Reflections on Success

“The Vikings thought they were big shots because they had boats. You know how obnoxious people get when they own a boat. They always want to go on the boat." We're taking the boat out this weekend. It's supposed to be beautiful. Why don't you come? You never come. You're always working. You know how many people wish they would get invited to come on the boat? And you turn it down.”
― Colin Quinn, The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America

“A soft luxurious course of habitual indulgence, is the practice of the bulk of modern Christians: and that constant moderation, that wholesome discipline of restraint and self-denial, which are requisite to prevent the unperceived encroachments of the inferior appetites, seem altogether disused, as the exploded austerities of monkish superstition...

But the persons of whom we are now speaking, forgetting alike the duties they owe to themselves and to their fellow-creatures, often act as though their condition were meant to be a state of uniform indulgence, and vacant, unprofitable sloth...

To multiply the comforts of affluence, to provide for the gratification of appetite, to be luxurious without diseases, and indolent without lassitude, seems the chief study of their lives. Others again seem more to attach themselves to what have been well termed the ‘pomps and vanities of this world.’ Magnificent houses, grand equipages, numerous retinues, splendid entertainments, high and fashionable connections, appear to constitute, in their estimation, the supreme happiness of life.”
― William Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious Systems

“Stupidity is most often concealed by education, fame, adulthood, beauty, affluence, popularity, sexiness, old age, authority, and a suit.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“In actual fact it would seem that during the Cold War, if not during World War II, this country has become frankly a warfare state built on affluence, a power structure in which the interests of big business, the obsessions of the military, and the phobias of political extremists both dominate and dictate our national policy. It also seems that the people of the country are by and large reduced to passivity, confusion, resentment, frustration, thoughtlessness and ignorance, so that they blindly follow any line that is unraveled for them by the mass media.”
― Thomas Merton, Cold War Letters

“There are three impossibilities in life: God cannot lie, God cannot change and finally, I cannot be a poor man.”
― Ikechukwu Izuakor, Great Reflections on Success

“Today, one must either be isolated and cut off, or a carefully guarded, affluent drop-out, to allow one's children to play in an environment where they listen to people rather than to stars, speakers, or instructors. All over the world, one can see the rapid encroachment of the disciplined acquiescence that characterizes the audience, the client, the customer.”
― Ivan Illich, The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies

“Every opportunity, every influence and affluence you possess, could not have been for you alone, but to act as a platform to impact a generation.”
― Sunday Adelaja, The Mountain of Ignorance

“Where affluence is the rule, the true threat is the loss of desire,(...) What is new is not that prosperity depends on stimulating demand. It is that it cannot continue without inventing new vices”
― John N. Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Influence creates affluence. Affluence does not create influence. Affluence makes you more of who you already are.”
― Richie Norton

“For the first time then I recognized that supremacy in our society came from one’s proximity to gold, not from mere excellence - 'If you come with me, what do you bring? If I come to you, what can you give me?”
― Mukta Singh-Zocchi, Game of Big Numbers

“Western society is so unappealing. On a material level, it is clearly more comfortable and protected from the hardships of the natural world. But, as societies become more affluent they tend to require more, rather than less, time and commitment by the individual, and it's possible that many people feel that affluence and safety simply aren't a good trade for freedom.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“People with no sense or appreciation of humor, Invigilator, always take money too seriously. Its possession, anyway.

Which is why they spend all their time stacking coins, counting this and that, gazing lovingly over their hoards and so on. They're compensating for the abject penury everywhere else in their lives.

Nice rings, by the way.”
― Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale

“Poor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are. And as a result, they live in closer communities. Inter-reliant poverty comes with its own stresses, and certainly isn't the American ideal, but its much closer to our evolutionary heritage than affluence. A wealthy person who has never had to rely on help and resources from his community is leading a privileged life that falls way outside more than a million years of human experience.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“Whether it is big or small, the size of a poor man’s yard incessantly reminds him that he is poor.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“If you have money, you are affluent; if you have joy, you are wealthy; and if you have love, you are rich.”
― Matshona Dhliwayo

“To have affluence is to spread kingdom principles”
― Sunday Adelaja

“Granted, many of them replied, that socialism may not result in riches for all but rather in a smaller production of wealth; nevertheless the masses will be happier under socialism, because they will share their worries with all their fellow citizens, and there will not be wealthier classes to be envied by poorer ones. The starving and ragged workers of Soviet Russia, they tell us, are a thousand times more joyful than the workers of the West who live under conditions which are luxurious compared to Russian standards; equality in poverty is a more satisfactory state than well-being where there are people who can flaunt more luxuries than the average man.”
― Ludwig von Mises

“I fear that we are being led to become morally lazy. Our affluence has given many of us almost immediate access to virtually anything we want. We have grown comfortable with indulgence, and we don't want to feel guilty about it. Guilt prods us toward the hard work of changing. That's why we want our heroes to be flawed like we are. They assure us that our weaknesses, addictions, moral lapses, and compromises are not unusual. Such heroes become mirrors reflecting a comfortable image that says, Hey, don't get so uptight about your failures and lapses. We're all like this.”
― Michael W Smith

“Those favored with the double-portion flavor of affluence and influence often fail to express affection for the affliction of the unfortunate.”
― Vincent Okay Nwachukwu, Weighty 'n' Worthy African Proverbs - Volume 1

“We fight our wars and leave in our wake the redolent reek of suffering and misery.

These plains are vast, are they not? What terrible cost would we face if we just left each other alone? An end to this squabble over land - Father Shadow knows, no-one really owns it.

The game of possession belongs to us, not to the rocks and earth, the grasses and the creatures walking the surface in their fraught struggle to survive.”
― Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale

“A woman of vision comprehends that current circumstances do not reflect what her future holds. In her eyes, she sees continuance. In her mind, she thinks influence and in her heart, she longs for affluence.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, Woman of Virtue: Power-Filled Quotes for a Powerful Woman

“A woman of vision comprehends that current circumstances do not reflect what her future holds. In her eyes, she sees continuance. In her mind, she thinks influence, and in her heart, she longs for affluence.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, Woman of Virtue: Power-Filled Quotes for a Powerful Woman

“Transformational leadership is about the right influence on followers rather than creating affluence for individual leaders.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, The Effective Leadership Prototype for a Modern Day Leader

“He who has more money or possessions than you is not necessarily happier than you, happy more often than you, or happy like you.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Why is water so often a metaphor for money? Perhaps because we like to believe that our economic system is naturally occurring, not man-made. Maybe the movement of money feels inevitable if you imagine it as water, with only blameless gravity participating in the accumulation of wealth.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“I'm driving home to change," Win said. "Then I'm dining at Merion." Mainliners never ate; they dined. "Care to join me?”
― Harlan Coben, Back Spin